Cosmic tango, animals using tools and your dog’s love might not be mutual: The Week in Science

NASA scientists found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets orbiting three different stars. All five planets appear to be hazy. This illustration shows a star’s light illuminating the atmosphere of a planet.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Two black holes are entwined in a gravitational tango in this artist’s conception.
Image Credit: NASA

Researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to find signs of water 1000-light-years away, a pair of black holes in a distant galaxy do the tango, crocodiles and alligators have been observed using tools, your dog (much like your cat) might not love you back, men and women have differently wired brains and more, this week in science.

Water found on distant planets

The aging Hubble Space Telescope still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Two recent studies have used Hubble data to locate 5 exoplanets that have signs of water in their atmosphere. Some of the headlines are a bit misleading, as these planets are not likely to support life. All of the exoplanets are Jupiter-sized gas giants and the water, such as it is, is vapor trapped in the planet’s dense atmospheres. The orbits of these planets are also perilously close to the sun, making them all raging infernos. The exciting part is that we can use current technology to detect traces of water on distant worlds, meaning we just have to look a bit closer to hopefully find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone with potential signs of water. And all this on a telescope launched in 1990. What amazing views will the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s successor, bring?

BLACK HOLES DOING THE TANGO

Scanning through old WISE telescope data, researchers found a cosmic dance of super-massive proportions. Locked in the center of a distant galaxy, they found two black holes “circling each other like dance partners.” After finding the duet, the researchers used follow-up observations from the Australian Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, Australia, and the Gemini South telescope in Chile to confirm the strange behavior. One theory behind the size of massive black holes, and the dancing duet, is that they are caused by galaxies colliding and one black hole cannibalising the other.

CROCODILES PORTEND THE END OF HUMANITY

If the animal kingdom ever does rise up to take Earth back from people, crocodiles and alligators may play a vital role. In a new paper published in Ethology Ecology & Evolution, researchers have found two distinct species, one in India and the other in the U.S., using tools to hunt. It’s not as frightening as it initially sounds, they are balancing sticks on their snout to lure in birds. But every species has to start somewhere. A few thousand years and we might genuinely be in trouble.

Dogs might not love you either

Last week, I linked to a study that determined cats never evolved to care about their owners. This week, we have a similar study on dogs. The study had owners answer a questionnaire ranking their interaction and relationship with their dogs. Then the researchers ran the dogs through a modified “strange situation” procedure, normally ran on toddlers. Unfortunately for dog owners, the researchers found no correlation between “perceived emotional closeness” as ranked on their questionnaire and the dogs behavior in the strange situation. Paired with last week’s cat study, it seems cat and dog owners alike have misjudged their relationship with their pets.

WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, set out to decide if men and women really are from different planets. The researchers used nearly 1,000 brain scans and looked for how the brain’s wiring differs between genders. They determined that women’s brains have a bias towards left to right hemisphere connections and men’s brains were wired with a front to back bias. Ragina Verma, one of the researchers on the study, was surprised at “how much the findings supported old stereotypes.” The study is not without controversy, Slate has a response titled “The Most Neurosexist Study of the Year?” and the author argues a few points of interest that the study, apparently, did not take into account.

ANCIENT DNA DISCOVERED

A 400,000 year old leg bone found in Spain recently had its DNA checked, and rather than finding the expected connection between this early man and the Neanderthal, human evolution researchers instead found similarities between this ancient man and the more mysterious, and younger, Denisovan people. Very little is known about the Denisovans, and what we do know mostly comes from a sole finger bone found in a Siberian cave dated to about 41,000 years ago. So then, what is this Denisovan ancestor doing in Spain? Analyzing the DNA, researchers have determined that this spanish species and the Denisovans in Siberia shared an even more ancient ancestor, dating back to somewhere around 700,000 years ago.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

A study published in Nature Geoscience took a look at Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and found that the moon’s oceans are so turbulent at lower latitudes that the thick ice sheet surrounding the moon gets broken and that the ocean-driven heat may make the equatorial region a prime hunting ground for possible alien life.

Over the last six months, Google has been quietly buying up technology companies that focus on robotics. While the specifics behind what Google is planning aren’t clear, they have tasked Andy Rubin, the creator and former head of Google’s Android platform, with heading robot research.

A study published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics by Springer has determined that we have no idea what our fingers are doing when we type. Scientists have known about automatic behavior, where we perform complex tasks without conscious thought, but hadn’t tested it on our typing ability before.

The Week in Science takes a look at new discoveries, new technologies and new breakthroughs from every discipline. There are many each week that I can’t include and more still that I didn’t even see. Did you read about something cool that is science related? Send me a link at daniel.aitken@langnews.com and maybe it will make it on next weeks list.